The Back Garden Project: Planting Time

This is the fifth post in The Back Garden Project, one GOOD community member's effort to turn a neglected corner of the city into a thriving garden.

As promised, here's my first sketch at how I'm planning to lay out my new garden. In fact, I've already started on some of the ideas.

You can see I've decided to allow a few patches of volunteers to stay (including some of those troublesome Japanese knotweeds I mentioned earlier). I have two reasons for this. First, they're in places that get some of the worst light in the garden (they're the really tall bushes in the background of the shot below), so they're sort of helping fill out areas that I'm not ready to do anything with. And second, I've started to feel bad pulling up so many plants and roots, even if they are invasive species. We are a nation of immigrants after all, and nowhere more so than here in New York. These suckers have probably lived in New York longer than I have. So some of them get to stay.

I've decided to think of the plot in terms of different little areas. Not only do I think this is more appealing from a landscape design perspective, it also allows me to stick to my original idea of a garden of shade-tolerant native plants, while also taking advantage of the unexpectedly decent sunlight at the bottom of the yard for non-native wildflowers and edible produce.

I've only begun the process of acquiring native plant starters for the garden, but so far here's the list: the Thuja occidentalis cedar I mentioned last time, three different ferns (Ostrich, Royal, and Cinnamon), amayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) to get the shade garden started, and a globeflower (Trollius laxus) and goldenrod (Solidago cutleri) to begin planting in my metal track flowerbed (pictured). I'll be on the look out for more options this week.

For now, here's an image of the brand new shade garden with its first few additions:

As you can see from the plan at the top of this post, there are many other components to the garden I have in mind, and I'll be discussing them all in turn as they come to fruition. For example, I've already started work on making a planter out of what I think is part of a discarded Ikea bookshelf that I found back there. More on that next time.